Reporting Biases in Empirical Management Research: The Example of Win-Win Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

Reporting biases refer to a truncated pool of published studies with the resulting suppression or omission of some empirical findings. Such biases can occur in positive research paradigms that try to uncover correlations and causal relationships in the social world by using the empirical methods of (natural) science. Furthermore, reporting biases can come about because of authors who do not write papers that report unfavorable results despite strong efforts made to find previously accepted evidence and because of a higher rejection rate of studies documenting contradictory evidence. Reporting biases are a serious concern because the conclusions of systematic reviews and meta-analyses can be misleading. The authors show that published evidence in win-win corporate social responsibility (CSR) research tends to overestimate efficiency. The research field expects to find a positive association between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP), and findings meet that expectation. The authors explain how this pattern may reflect reporting bias. The empirical results show strong tentative evidence for a positive reporting bias in the CSP–CFP literature but only weak tentative evidence for CSP efficiency. The study also examines which factors, such as time trends, publication outlet, and study characteristics, are associated with higher reporting biases within this literature.

Measure the Performance with the Market Value Added: Evidence from CSR Companies

“…(Intangible Asset) annual expenditure on intangible heritage, namely copyrights, patents, intellectual property and know-how. Intangible spending drives performance and can easily be used as an instrumental variable (See [7,102] (among others) about endogeneity problems. ), which is also strongly correlated to CSR; (c) STLT (Data source: Perfect Analysis-"Common Size "ST Debt (% of Assets)" and "LT Debt (% of Assets).")…”

Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility Dimensions on Firm Value: Some Evidence from Hong Kong and China

“…Despite voluminous empirical studies over the past four decades see [2][3][4] for reviews, there remains considerable debate and inconclusiveness about this question. While a number of meta-analytic reviews suggest that there is a positive (albeit small) link between the implementation of CSR practices and firm value [3], doubts continue to persist due to the impact of positive publication bias [5]; sample size and methodological deficiencies used in studies that have investigated this link [6,7]; the moderating effect of environmental factors such as the maturity of institutional systems and the efficiency of market mechanisms present in different countries [7] and the variability in the institutional usage of CSR (instrumental, political and isomorphic) by firms [8].…”

Facing the Normative Challenges: The Potential of Reflexive Historical Research

“…We have argued that both the Eisenhardt and the Gioia template emphasize the computational manner of doing research, when in our opinion interesting and novel findings are actually constructed by cognitive minds. By stressing researcher invariant activities, research presented in the realist paradigm can be criticized as to whether and to which extent the findings are biased by the normative agenda (Rost & Ehrmann, 2015). Moreover, research that does not acknowledge and reflect the researchers' norms is at risk of (inadvertently) crafting political narratives.…”